Daylight Savings - Are You Ready to Spring Forward?

[tnbutterfly - Mary, BSN]

Daylight Savings Time begins tomorrow morning at 2 a.m. Be sure to adjust your clocks tonight. How do you reduce time -change sleepiness due to losing one hour of sleep as we Spring Forward?

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Well. I don't set an alarm on Sundays to begin with, so I don't think losing sleep will be an issue ?

I do, however, think Daylight Saving Time is past its need and should go away. Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa have already decided not to participate.

[JBMmom, MSN, NP]

I don't mind the Spring ahead night anymore because I've worked the last 4 or 5 so my body adjusts quickly to one less hour of work. ?

It's the fall back with an extra hour of work and the computer systems down that I hate most.

I agree with Rose_Queen, though, that this system really should be done away with. My dogs get super confused. 

[Davey Do]

2 hours ago, tnbutterfly - Mary said:

How do you reduce time -change sleepiness due to losing one hour of sleep as we Spring Forward?

 

[Tweety, BSN, RN]

A few years ago I thought Florida applied to congress to get out of it, but it's gotten no where.

Thankfully this year I don't have to work.  I work every other weekend and when it falls on my weekend I really miss that hour.

 

[Davey Do]

I once noted in a journal that with all the clocks that I have in my house, in order to have the time to change them, I need to take daylight savings night off.

[JKL33]

I ? DST, absolutely love it.

[macawake, MSN]

On 3/13/2022 at 7:32 PM, JKL33 said:

I ? DST, absolutely love it.

Me too❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️????? (<— yes, that is how much I love it). 

I have to wait another two weeks, and I can’t wait.. Perhaps you have to live in the same zip code as the North Pole, like I do, to fully appreciate how much happiness Daylight Savings brings. In December and January it’s pitch-black for about eighteen hours a day. And on overcast days, the six hours of ”light” is simply a grayish and depressing hue of twilight. 
 

Now the days are getting longer ? Come June it will be possible to read a newspaper outdoors at midnight (not that I’m in a habit of doing that). The sun is up for nineteen hours or so and when it sets, its trajectory is so close to the horizon that it’s still light. Love it!

I never really understood why some people have their sleep affected from changing the clock a single hour, twice a year. Most of us don’t go to sleep and get up and the exact same times 365 days per year. Parents with babies or young kids certainly don’t, and when we go on vacation chances are that we travel much more than one time zone. A bit of a mystery to me. 

I'm happy that we don't have to change the time anymore.  

[Tweety, BSN, RN]

On 3/15/2022 at 2:20 PM, macawake said:

Me too❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️????? (<— yes, that is how much I love it). 

I have to wait another two weeks, and I can’t wait.. Perhaps you have to live in the same zip code as the North Pole, like I do, to fully appreciate how much happiness Daylight Savings brings. In December and January it’s pitch-black for about eighteen hours a day. And on overcast days, the six hours of ”light” is simply a grayish and depressing hue of twilight. 
 

Now the days are getting longer ? Come June it will be possible to read a newspaper outdoors at midnight (not that I’m in a habit of doing that). The sun is up for nineteen hours or so and when it sets, its trajectory is so close to the horizon that it’s still light. Love it!

I never really understood why some people have their sleep affected from changing the clock a single hour, twice a year. Most of us don’t go to sleep and get up and the exact same times 365 days per year. Parents with babies or young kids certainly don’t, and when we go on vacation chances are that we travel much more than one time zone. A bit of a mystery to me. 

But really is changing the clock an hour going to change those daylight hours?  It just changes the time of day.

Changing times and hour doesn't really affect me much except when I'm working and we jump an hour.  But the disruption is really temporary.  Even when we gain an hour if I'm working I tend to get up at the usual time and have a long day for having gotten up too early.  If I'm off, I recover nicely.  

Sleep experts are weighing in on the decision saying they got it backwards.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/03/16/daylight-saving-bill-health-effects/

[JKL33]

2 hours ago, Tweety said:

Sleep experts are weighing in on the decision saying they got it backwards.

 

3 hours ago, Tweety said:

But really is changing the clock an hour going to change those daylight hours?  It just changes the time of day.

Well, it moves that hour of daylight from "getting ready for work time" to "personal time" for a lot of people.

The experts quite dramatic.

I am no expert but I suspect standard time significantly contributes significantly to depression/SAD in some areas of the country. It's hard to care about "jet lag" (not even a real one such as one would experience when traveling to/from areas with the exact opposite of one's usual sleep/wake rhythms) and the minutiae of circadian rhythm if the bottom line is that there is almost ZERO daylight when one is done with the work day. Many people find that not remotely pleasant. It also seems counterintuitive to our more recent acknowledgements of need for self-care in that the suggestion of (only) needing daylight for the purposes of getting the work day started seems like someone else's version of a good idea, not the workers who are driving home in the dark/dusk at 5 pm with plenty of waking hours left in the day.

I also do not imagine that early dusk benefits our obesity problem. Again, no expertise--just my feeling.

They also say that this change could contribute to depression due to the perpetual "jet lag" and incorrect exposure to daylight. I guess they're the experts, but we seem to have hefty incidence of depression at baseline so it seems unlikely that more personal-time/after-work daylight is going to worsen that.

Ah well. What would we possibly find to do if not argue about things.

16 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

 

Well, it moves that hour of daylight from "getting ready for work time" to "personal time" for a lot of people.

The experts quite dramatic.

I am no expert but I suspect standard time significantly contributes significantly to depression/SAD in some areas of the country. It's hard to care about "jet lag" (not even a real one such as one would experience when traveling to/from areas with the exact opposite of one's usual sleep/wake rhythms) and the minutiae of circadian rhythm if the bottom line is that there is almost ZERO daylight when one is done with the work day. Many people find that not remotely pleasant. It also seems counterintuitive to our more recent acknowledgements of need for self-care in that the suggestion of (only) needing daylight for the purposes of getting the work day started seems like someone else's version of a good idea, not the workers who are driving home in the dark/dusk at 5 pm with plenty of waking hours left in the day.

I also do not imagine that early dusk benefits our obesity problem. Again, no expertise--just my feeling.

They also say that this change could contribute to depression due to the perpetual "jet lag" and incorrect exposure to daylight. I guess they're the experts, but we seem to have hefty incidence of depression at baseline so it seems unlikely that more personal-time/after-work daylight is going to worsen that.

Ah well. What would we possibly find to do if not argue about things.

I tend to think our baseline depression is more linked to the treadmill, capitalist life styles that keep the majority humping just to afford shelter, food and transportation with little time or resources for recreation and little hope for something better. Sanjay Gupta produced a documentary that makes a case that our problems with obesity and opiate abuse is more related to despair than we might prefer.